Five Alternative Films To Watch During Lockdown
STALKER (1979)
The masterpiece that killed it’s director and leading actor, ‘Stalker’ is one of the best films ever made. In a bleak Soviet landscape that’s strangely prescient of the Chernobyl disaster that followed seven years later, a ‘stalker’ leads two men into ‘The Zone’, a dangerous area of natural beauty and temporal flux to find ‘The Room’ in its heart of darkness, where innermost dreams are realised.
The apocalyptic world that’s conjured here through Tarkovsky’s extraordinary visuals will satisfy your dystopian cravings - and there are strange parallels to some of the more nightmarish affects of lockdown. Space and the natural world in the film are hauntingly beautiful, but each step is a potential supernatural trap. Movement through ‘The Zone’ is an experience that’s both tranquil and chilling, mirroring the strangeness of walking through an empty London today.
The film was entirely reshot after the reels were badly developed and tinged with green - these reels were then destroyed in a later fire. Those who saw the original cut said it was even more beautiful than the version we know today. Infamously, the film is thought to have killed Tarkovsky and actor Anatoly Solonitsyn, as both died from cancers linked to a scene shot in an Estonian river overflowing with poisons from a nearby chemical plant.
EMPIRE (1964)
Since you’ve been furloughed, you’ve got no excuses to avoid Andy Warhol’s ‘Empire’, an eight hour thriller that consists of one slow motion shot of the Empire State Building.
It’s hard not to feel sorry for the New Yorkers that queued excitedly to see the premier of the film, who quickly turned into an angry mob after they realised the joke was on them and threatened to destroy the theatre if they didn’t get their money back.
Warhol is fascinated with boredom and vacuity, stating that “Apparently, most people love watching the same basic thing, as long as the details are different. But I’m just the opposite: if I’m going to sit and watch the same thing I saw the night before, I don’t want it to be essentially the same—I want it to be exactly the same. Because the more you look at the same exact thing, the more the meaning goes away, and the better and emptier you feel.”
Like all of Warhol’s work and words, this is playful and self-aware, but perhaps there’s a grim relevance to today’s monotony and the endless, Waiting-for-Godot daily briefings inflicted on us by the government.
See also: Warhol’s ‘Blow Job’, the least erotic erotic film ever made.
BURIED (2010)
Who wouldn’t want to quarantine with Ryan Reynolds in a coffin in Iraq? There’s pleasingly little Deadpool-style banter from Reynolds who self-isolates admirably in this horribly claustrophobic thriller from Spanish director Rodrigo Cortes.
Reynolds plays a truck driver who’s kidnapped and held for ransom in a coffin with just a lighter and phone for company. He desperately calls his family and his contractor, but this is before the days of Zoom and Cortes’ camera remains fixed on the confines of the coffin throughout. At least we’re allowed out for a walk a day. Reynolds suffered genuine claustrophobia during filming, notably when the coffin was slowly filled with sand on the final day, which Reynolds described as "unlike anything I experienced in my life, and I never ever want to experience that again."
If you’re looking for a filmic parallel to the spacial strangulation we’re experiencing at the moment (and you probably aren’t), Buried now has a grim and literal significance.
MULLHOLLAND DRIVE (2001)
I don’t know about anyone else, but I’ve had a real craving for David Lynch since lockdown began. The insidiousness at the heart of suburbia, the abnormal beneath the normal, should have a real relevance for anyone moving out of the city and back to a family home - and Lynch is the master of exposing the horrors that lie behind.
But Mullholland Drive is arguably his best work, telling the story of Betty, an aspiring actress in LA, who finds a finds a young woman named in her bed with no memory of how she got there or who she is. The woman re-names herself Rita after seeing a film poster featuring Rita Hayworth, and the two characters begin to piece together her past, the first clue being Rita’s singular memory of the road Mullholland Drive. The story is notoriously difficult to follow, veering from discoveries crucial to the main plot to unexplained vignettes, dead ends, half-shadowed characters, each of which pack an enormous emotional punch but are left in tantalising suspension, as if mirroring Rita’s partial amnesia. As Robbie Collin has noted, the film is like a puzzle with too many pieces.
This is a remarkable cinematic experience that oscillates between real terror - notably in the most famous jump scare in recent history - and something more ethereal, dreamlike. In one scene, Rita and Betty visit a theatre where the compere announces a woman will be lip-synching to a recording. The performance is utterly captivating, bursting with pain and beauty and soul, almost transcendent. The song finishes and we are soberingly reminded by the host that this is a recording, an illusion. This is the trick Lynch plays again and again, announcing the artifice of the scene before emotionally drugging us, falling under his spell, only to reveal again the mechanics of the trick.
This is not to invalidate the intoxicating charms of cinema’s tropes and characters, but to redouble their effects, to champion the paradoxical forces of construction and creation within the nucleus of every great work of art.
INSIDE OUT (2015)
“Inside Out isn’t alternative you fucking normie!” I hear you cry. I respectfully disagree.
Not only is this my favourite Pixar film, it’s probably in my top five films generally - and it’s in danger of being forgotten as a minor footnote at the end of Pixar’s incredible hotstreak. It follows the story of Riley and her parents as they move house, and Riley’s struggles as she readjusts to a new area and new school. The story within the story is that Riley’s emotions - Joy, Sadness, Anger, Fear and Disgust - are personified as separate characters squabbling for control of Riley’s emotional thrust. When Riley’s core memories of home and happiness are literally lost within her subconscious, Joy and Sadness are tasked with retrieving them and steering Riley back towards emotional stability.
The film is like a fine watch, so meticulously crafted and balanced. Each event within the world of the mind has a wonderfully subtle effect on the Riley’s trajectory, expressed through minute visual detail like her facial expressions. Pixar also deserve huge credit for consistently delivering films that are enjoyed by children and adults equally, proving that it’s possible within animation to balance superficial comedy and action with more challenging ideas about our mental health and emotional composite.
A more uplifting choice deserved the final place on my list, and the film has a powerful significance during times of lockdown. Life feels inside out - the same range of emotional experiences confined to the home. The physical restrictions implied by self-isolation are opposed by the anxiety of the racing mind. It does not seem childlike to personify our emotions the way the film does in times like these, now that we’re each afforded so much time for self-reflection, impossible to avoid the temptation to categorise and count our mental responses to the biggest worldwide crisis of a generation.
I’ve seen three times and I’ve cried three times. But like Riley, at the end I felt deeply comforted. A nourishing tonic for these challenging times.